A wireless communication device may include a Wi-Fi module including one or more system-on-chip (SOC) and a number of frontend modules (FEMs). The SOC can include baseband and radio circuits, and a power management unit (PMU), among other circuits. The radio can include up and down (up/down) conversion mixers, low noise amplifiers (LNAs) in the receive (RX) path and power amplifiers (PAs) in the transmit (TX) path. The FEMs can be coupled to the SOC via filters, splitters and/or combiners through conductive routes on the Wi-Fi module. The Wi-Fi module is traditionally at a distance from antennas that, for example, in a mobile communication device can be positioned on the edges of the device motherboard (e.g., a multi-layer board (MLB)). Filters and multiplexer (e.g., diplexers and triplexers) are usually placed in close proximity to the Wi-Fi module and are coupled to the antennas through long radio-frequency (RF) routes on the MLB. Each FEM can include LNAs and PAs for RX and TX path, as well as one or more switches (e.g., a TX/RX switch)
The wireless communication device may include, for example, Wi-Fi channels such as 2 GHz (e.g., with a frequency band between about 2.4-2.8 GHz) and 5 GHz (e.g., with a frequency band between about 4.9-5.9 GHz) Wi-Fi channels, as well as, a Bluetooth channel (e.g., with a frequency band between about 2.4-2.485 GHz). The wireless communication device may be a multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) device with multiple antennas and with the SOC radio including a number of radio cores. The radio cores can, for example, be partitioned into a main core and an auxiliary (aux) core. For instance, each of the main core and the aux core can include multiple radios, for example, 2 GHz radio cores (e.g., 2 GHz core-0 and 2 GHz core-1) and 5 GHz radio cores (e.g., 5 GHz core-0 and 5 GHz core-1).
The traditional configuration of the Wi-Fi module that includes the FEMs has to be coupled to the antennas through long RF routes in MLB that can introduce high insertion loss at PA(s) output(s) and/or at LNA(s) input(s) and therefore compromise the communication device performance. The placement of the FEMs in the SOC further reduces device features due to the size limitation of the Wi-Fi module. Therefore, solutions are needed to address this shortcomings of the traditional Wi-Fi modules.